Ghost Hunting (4 page)

UNHOLY SPIRITS FEBRUARY 1998

W
e look to our houses of worship for shelter in spiritual matters. But what happens when a house of worship is itself haunted?

That was the question in front of us when a pastor in eastern Connecticut called T.A.P.S. to investigate his old Baptist church, which was rife with seemingly paranormal activity. He first got an inkling that something was amiss when he heard laughter from the mezzanine during one of his sermons. Although the church was full at the time, he was the only one who heard the strange laughing sound. It chilled him, but he convinced himself that he had misheard. Then it happened again, and it continued to happen.

When he was busy in his office, he would hear the sounds of a crowd in the chapel. But when he went to check out the noise, he saw no one. Lights turned on late at night, seemingly of their own volition. One time when the pastor arrived at the church early, he found most of the free-standing pews stacked in front of the main chapel doors.

From the vantage point of a playground across the street from the church, parents pushing their kids on swings would see a winged creature standing next to the church entrance—and it didn’t look like an angel. Its wings were sloped downward, like a demon’s.

Clearly the pastor had a problem, one he couldn’t dismiss. The final straw was when he was standing in the chapel and saw some man-shaped shadows approach him, then fade away. It made him wonder if there was something evil in his church, something that needed to be addressed—and soon.

When our team arrived, we found the pastor to be a kindly, soft-spoken gentleman. He and his maintenance man gave us a tour of the church property, which included a walk through an old Christian graveyard. We would have to investigate that as well if we were going to do a thorough job.

As we returned to the church, the pastor mentioned that the building was old, but he didn’t know exactly how old. In fact, he didn’t know very much of its history. We made it our business to do some research in that regard.

As two of our people continued to interview the pastor, Grant, Keith Johnson, and I set up our equipment in the chapel and the mezzanine above it. We didn’t have to wait long before we started seeing the types of activity the pastor had seen.

At about 12:45 a.m., the motion detectors we had left in the mezzanine sounded an alarm just as the temperature in the chapel plummeted some twelve degrees. A knocking sound traveled rapidly around the perimeter of the chapel from one end to the other. And soon after, Keith recorded an EVP from the mezzanine that sounded like people marching.

At around 2:00 a.m., we were all in the church’s rec room. One of our members went into the chapel to retrieve her EMF detector (a piece of equipment that measures variances in the electromagnetic field), which she had left there, and she witnessed three apparitions dressed in outdated clothing—all of them male. We rushed out into the chapel to join her, too late to see the apparitions. But we could hear faint sounds of many people moving about.

At the same time, one of our members who was checking out the graveyard caught sight of an entity walking through it. It looked to him like a soldier. When he approached it, the entity appeared to dissipate.

The evidence was mounting that we weren’t dealing with one supernatural entity but many. The question was
why
. What had happened in that place to tie so many spirits to it? Why were they still there?

The next day, we began our research—and found some answers. It turned out that the church wasn’t the first one to stand on that property. Another church had preceded it—one that was had been used as a refuge for soldiers returning from the Civil War. Unfortunately, that earlier church had caught fire one night, and many of those sleeping inside it had perished in the blaze.

Sometime later, the current church was erected, built on the original foundation. That was why we had heard the sound of marching. We were dealing with the spirits of Civil War soldiers. At the pastor’s request, Keith blessed the place and set the spirits free. The activity ceased immediately.

POSSESSED MAY 1998

W
hen Nora and Timothy Sawyer called T.A.P.S. in a panic because their daughter Emily was cursing a blue streak and throwing heavy furniture around the room, one word kept coming up over and over again: Possession.

Everyone who has seen the movie
The Exorcist
knows about possession. An individual is taken over by a demonic entity, often through no fault of her own. The victim may babble, fall prey to seizures, display marked changes in personality, or demonstrate superhuman strength.

Emily Sawyer was doing all of the above.

When our T.A.P.S. team arrived at the Sawyer house in Falmouth, Massachusetts, nine-year-old Emily was dragging furniture around her bedroom and swearing like a sailor. It took all four of us—Grant, me, Andrew Graham, and a Catholic priest—to restrain her. It wasn’t easy, either. We didn’t want to hurt her. We just wanted to evict the demon inside her.

As the priest began the rite of exorcism, Emily was still twitching and spasming, her pupils dilated, her hands curled into claws. Her face was a battleground, reflecting the forces writhing inside her. As fathers, it tore us up to see a child in such torment. Finally, the rite was completed and she went limp.

By then, we were pretty limp too, our clothes damp with sweat. But our job wasn’t done. It’s not enough to chase the demonic spirit from its host. You have to cleanse the whole house.

As the priest and Andrew opened doors and blessed all the other rooms in the house, Grant and I sat down with the family, which included another daughter—a sixteen-year-old named Annie. They told us they had been experiencing other phenomena besides Emily’s bizarre rampages.

There were drastic temperature changes in the house, usually from cold to hot. Growls could be heard in the hallways and in the basement. From time to time, they smelled dirty diapers in the girls’ bedrooms.

The adults said they had seen objects moving on their own—candles sliding, chairs falling over, and the chandelier spinning in the kitchen. Annie, on the other hand, seemed reluctant to talk about the moving objects. Grant and I got the impression that she was holding something back.

When we pressed her, she admitted that she and her friends had begun using a Ouija board and dabbling in black magic. However, she said, she hadn’t gotten her sister involved in any way. Her parents went nuts, demanding to know the extent of what she had done and why she hadn’t told them about it.

As they argued, Grant and I saw dark masses appear and slink around the hallway and the bottom of the stairway. The temperature in the room was rising noticeably—nearly fifteen degrees, according to our instruments. Up in her bedroom, Emily began to foam at the mouth.

Calming everyone down, Grant and I explained to Annie what she had brought into the house. When it comes to the occult, the younger members of a household “belong” to the older members and can be placed at risk by the older members’ actions. So when Annie had taken part in black magic, she’d dragged her sister in with her, and it was Emily who was paying the price.

It was critical that Annie stayed away from the occult from that point on, or her sister would be placed in jeopardy again, exorcism or no exorcism. Responding to what was essentially a wake-up call, Annie agreed to steer clear of black magic. She just hadn’t realized the demonic trouble she’d been inviting.

Unfortunately, the trouble wasn’t gone yet. It continued to rage as our friend the priest blessed one part of the house after another. The chandelier in the kitchen spun around, all the doors in the hallway swung open and closed, and two more black masses appeared in the corners of rooms.

Finally, the priest had blessed every area in the house except the girls’ bedrooms. As he got to work there we experienced heightened activity, including crazy temperature swings and difficulty breathing. At one point, I was slapped in the shoulder by something I couldn’t see. Grant was grabbed around the middle.

The priest was feeling the entity’s resistance as well. However, he hung in there and finished with his blessing. As the entity left, there was a loud growling sound and the room seemed to shake. Then everything was still. Emily fell into a sound, untroubled sleep and, according to her parents, hardly got up for the next two days straight.

Grant and I got Annie to give us her Ouija board, and we removed it from the house. We’ve remained in contact with the Sawyer family, and we know that the demonic activity that plagued their family has ceased. The exorcism worked.

At T.A.P.S., we get “possession” calls all the time. Ninety-nine percent of them turn out to be bogus. This one was all too real.

SQUEAKY TOYS SEPTEMBER 1998

U
sually, dogs and cats react to spirits in a negative way. It’s difficult to say why. Maybe they’re sensitive to the paranormal in ways most human beings aren’t. But in the ghost-hunting field we never say never, because we’re constantly coming across exceptions to the rules.

One of them was in Toms River, New Jersey, in the condominium home Jim Coors shared with his dog Benny. We knew that the condo had been a flour mill at one time, so we kept that in mind during the investigation.

The problem, as reported by Coors, was that his dog liked to play with squeaky toys and the sounds of these toys kept him up at night. As a result, he had taken to stowing Benny’s three toys in a closet outside his bedroom. This seemed like a logical measure—until one day, Jim woke to the sound of squeaking and found Benny playing with his toys.

Thinking the closet door might not have locked, he went to check it out, only to find that it was closed. A curious situation, to say the least. The next night, Jim put Benny’s toys away in the closet again—and found them in Benny’s possession the following morning. As before, the closet door was shut, and Coors couldn’t imagine how Benny had gotten the toys.

Still trying to puzzle it out, he took his regular morning shower. As always, his bathroom mirror steamed up. There was nothing unusual about that. But when he got out of the shower, he saw handprints in the steam—small ones, like a child might have made. Freaking out a little, Coors tried to wipe off the prints, but they wouldn’t go away…because they were on the
inside
of the mirror.

After that, Coors noticed his dog playing with something he couldn’t see. This began to happen on a regular basis, making Coors wonder what was going on. But it didn’t actually scare him until he saw Benny playing with what appeared to be a small boy. A single man without any children, Coors went over to investigate and saw the boy dissipate like smoke on the wind.

It wasn’t the last time he would see the boy, either. The child turned up on Jim’s stairs, walking down them as if headed for the living room. Again, as soon as Coors approached him, he vanished.

And the squeaky toy problem kept getting bigger. The more Coors tried to keep the toys from Benny, the more they multiplied. New toys showed up alongside the old ones, though Coors hadn’t bought them. By the end of October, he found himself shoving as many as twenty toys into the closet at night. By the next morning they were out again—and the closet door was still locked.

At his wits’ end, he called in T.A.P.S. Grant and I showed up with Keith Johnson, Heather Drolet, and our usual complement of recording equipment. Heather was a single mom with three kids, who also happened to be a practicing pagan. When she first joined the group, we put her in charge of personnel, but she wanted to do more.

As we started bringing her along on investigations, we discovered that she was an uncanny interviewer. She could be as nice as you please but get just about anything out of anybody. She would ask a question five different ways until she finally got a reasonable answer.

In this case, however, we wanted her to learn more about the equipment, so while Grant and I interviewed Coors and calmed him down, Heather and Keith walked through the home and set up our instruments. Then we began our investigation.

The whole time, Benny looked at us with his big, innocent eyes. If he knew the truth of the situation, he wasn’t telling. One thing was for sure, though: he wasn’t skittish. If there was a spirit in the house, it didn’t bother him in the least.

The first thing I did was kick the shower on full blast at its highest temperature. When the room steamed up, it bore out what Coors had been saying. There were child-sized handprints on the inside of the mirror, and they wouldn’t go away no matter how much I wiped at them.

Unfortunately, we didn’t pick up any other evidence of the paranormal that night. But those handprints were clear proof that something was going on in the condo. Packing up and taking a couple of squeaky toys with us for analysis, we embarked on the research phase of our investigation.

It turned up some interesting information. Apparently, a ten-year-old boy had died of pneumonia in the immediate area, and the child Coors had seen playing with Benny looked to be about that age. We wondered if the boy’s spirit was the presence Coors had been experiencing.

As I mentioned, animals are usually stressed out by the paranormal. But if Benny was only seeing a small boy, he might not have felt threatened, regarding the boy as a playmate.

The one aspect of the case we couldn’t explain was the proliferation of squeaky toys. However, we offered the homeowner Keith’s services as a priest if he wanted to cleanse his condo of its resident spirit.

As it happened, Coors wouldn’t have any part of it. Now that he knew he was dealing with a child-entity and an apparently benign one, he felt much more comfortable with the situation. Even the squeaky toys didn’t seem to bother him so much—but he did give up on locking them up at night.